6.

Beyond the
political

Communism isn’t a political movement. It’s the critique of the state and of politics.

The intention of revolutionaries isn’t to conquer the state and help themselves to its power, clad in the ulterior motive of destroying it. The party of communism doesn’t claim to be a political party and it doesn’t mean to compete with these bodies.

With the establishment of communist community disappears all political activity, in its capacity as a distinct activity, and all pursuit of power for the sake of power. There is no longer a divide between the economy, that sphere of necessity, and politics, that sphere of liberty.

The end of the state

The cult of the state is fundamentally anti-communist.

Paradoxically, it’s born of and strengthened by all the flaws, all the failings, all the conflicts that capitalist society engenders. It is the supreme savior—the last resort of the widow and the orphan. Incidentally, although it claims to be above class, presenting itself as the public interest’s protector from individual excesses, it busies itself with defending property and privilege.

There was a time when the ascendant bourgeoisie exhibited anti-state sentiments. Today it only sulks. The time of bourgeois revolutionaries, claiming that the happiest peoples are stateless peoples, is over. The rise of the proletarian peril, the development of competing imperialisms, the sweep of economic crises—they’ve demonstrated all the benefits of holding a powerful machine of state and, above all, a good apparatus of repression.

In the name of the people, political parties vie for mastery of this state machine that they present as a neutral instrument. Logical Leninists proclaim the classed nature of the state and the impossibility of controlling it through simple electoral victories. They deduce from this the necessity of its dismantlement, but only in order to replace it with a “workers’ state.”

It’s to the anarchists’ credit that they’ve maintained a fundamental anti-statism.

However, even more than with the case of money, everybody makes it their duty to curse the state. They rail against the red tape of the administration, the burden of the taxes, the arrogance of the police, the graspings of politicians, the stupidity of voters… But the disappearance of the state—that’s what exceeds the limits of the imagination. And this is the very thing that they propose, unimaginatively, to bring to power.

Over the last few decades, the state has intervened more and more openly in social life. The advents of Stalinism and fascism were only the most visibly-marked stages in this process. Where some have imagined seeing the state making concessions to the people, it’s necessary to see the escalation of state control over their populations.

Especially noteworthy is the taking in hand, or the integration into the state apparatus, of organizations for workers’ defense and solidarity. Through various channels, social security and the apparatuses of trade unions have been subjugated to the state. This allows them to act more or less as special-interest groups. You can’t be deceived by their declarations of independence and opposition. It’s written into their roles.

Obviously, this assimilation of the struggle and officialization of the social partner have been presented as great victories for the working class. Workers’ struggles benefit a stratum of contestation specialists and result in the increased institutionalization of “workers’” organizations. Often, these “gains” don’t even result in a redistribution of resources to the most disadvantaged social strata, only helping to squeeze them for even more money—despite what’s claimed, hypocritically, by unions and governments.

Growing nationalization can’t be considered solely as a weakening of the proletariat. On the contrary, it corresponds to the necessity of controlling the proletariat’s growing power. This nationalization compensates for the fragility of modern societies. But it isn’t itself immune to that fragility; the state enclosure of the population is only possible with the complicity of that population. The anti-political revolution will ultimately reveal the superficial nature of this enclosure.

Unlike politicos of every persuasion, revolutionaries refrain from appealing to the responsibility of the state as soon as some problem arises. They systematically forward the autonomy and self-organization of the proletarian class. Invoking the weakness of the proletariat in order to justify recourse to the state—that justifies the weakness and poses it as eternal.

Revolutionary society will have systems for coordination and centralization. Often, it will even enable a more advanced, more global centralization than that enabled by capital. But it will have no need of a state where power is concentrated, of all this machinery for repressing, identifying, surveilling, educating. The administration of things will replace the government of men.

During an insurrectionary and intermediate phase, the problem is to avoid recreating a state while safeguarding functions that are administrative and repressive—and thus state-like. Those who don’t want to deal with this problem, like anarchists, can only be cuckolded by statists or forced to become statists themselves. During the Spanish Revolution, the participation of anarchist ministers in the junta government demonstrated what this could lead to.

The solution to this problem, to this contradiction, has been outlined by proletarian insurrections since the Paris Commune. It’s the workers’ council, the councilist organization of social life.

Workers’ councils

The Paris Commune had already offered the first glimpses at what a government of workers could be.

In 1905, insurgent Russian workers elaborated the form of the soviet. This organ, composed of factory delegates, was initially intended to coordinate the struggle. It transformed, bit by bit, into an administrative body aimed at taking the place of the official administration. The Petrograd Soviet even brought a portion of the police force under its control. Its existence came to an end when tsarist forces arrested its deputies. In 1917, with greater participation from soldiers, it began anew. The Bolshevik coup d’etat of October 1917 happened in the name of the power of the soviets. It relied on the soviets of Petrograd and Moscow, where Bolsheviks were controlling the military commissions and had conquered the majority of votes. This victory was the beginning of the end. With the waning of the revolution—the civil war, the fortification of the party and the administration of the Bolsheviks—the soviets were progressively emptied of their substance. The final resistance of the soviet, at the Kronstadt naval base, was crushed in 1921 by a Red Army directed by Trotsky, erstwhile president of the Petrograd soviet.

The proletarian uprisings of the 20th century regularly brought about the resurgence of the soviet system. In the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, workers’ councils were formed in Hungary, in Germany, in Italy, The Spanish Civil War would see the proliferation of committees of workers and peasants. In Hungary, in 1956, factory delegates formed the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest. In Poland, in 1971, insurgent workers of the Baltic ports once again organized themselves on this model.

The word council actually includes fairly diverse forms of organization, even if you exclude those organizations for co-management or management that aren’t at all revolutionary. This ranges from the committee for a factory, or a neighborhood, to the soviet that runs a large city or region. It’s a mistake to try to pit these organizations against each other in order to confer the title of “workers’ council” on only some of them.

We aren’t for this or that specific form of council. We’re for the councilist organization of society. This entails and necessitates varying levels of organization that complement and support each other. What would be bad—and what has regularly happened—is if one level were to win out.

The factory committee can be reduced to a simple function of worker control or pure management of a production unit. The lack of actual soviets in Spain and Catalonia, despite the flourishing of rank-and-file committees, left the field open to the Republican state and its politicians. Hence the anarchist dilemma.

The soviet, cut off from its rank and file, can turn itself into a kind of regional state or workers’ parliament. It ceases to be an active and anti-political organ so as to become a battlefield of political parties.

What gives the workers’ council its revolutionary character, what gives it its anti-political content, is principally the fact that it’s the direct embodiment of the masses in action. It’s formed of a pyramid of committees, giving rise to one another without the top being able to believe itself independent of the base.

The committees aren’t simple electoral assemblies, delegated power from the bottom up. Each level fulfills practical functions. Each committee is a community in action. It delegates to the higher levels what it can’t resolve on its own. It doesn’t surrender its sovereignty. Delegates are accountable to their mandators; they are accountable and revocable.

The workers’ council doesn’t reproduce, within itself, the divisions between legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It is concerned with unifying and concentrating, under its direction, these varying functions. Even if it issues decrees, it acts first and foremost in accordance with the circumstances without taking refuge behind an arsenal of formal laws.

The workers’ council establishes itself as a tribunal in order to settle conflicts—in order to judge, decide, and punish. These actions are carried out in accordance with concrete situations. What’s judged isn’t the gravity of the wrongdoing; it’s the damages and objective risks for the revolution and society.

The council doesn’t see its legitimacy secured by democratic elections that would render it the people’s anointed. It isn’t the representative of the masses. It is the masses, organized. Individuals and groups that take responsibility for particular tasks aren’t necessarily elected. But when they embroil the whole council, they’re responsible before its general assemblies. The council doesn’t claim to be the embodiment of all society, above the conflicts that society faces. It’s an organ of class and struggle. This implies some minimum of agreement, at its heart. It can’t tolerate divisions that would paralyze it.

The workers’ council can be viewed as an ultra-dictatorial or an ultra-democratic form. It’s both of these and something else besides. It’s ultra-dictatorial in the sense that it doesn’t purport to be accountable to anything but itself, and that it runs roughshod over the sacrosanct principle of the division of power. It’s ultra-democratic in the sense that it enables the masses to debate and participate to a degree never attained by the most democratic of states.

Above all, the workers’ council is no longer a political organ. It no longer partitions the citizen from the social individual. In this, it’s beyond dictatorship or democracy, which are the two faces of politics—even if it still makes use of processes or forms that are democratic or dictatorial.

The council is neither the instrument of a popular democracy nor the instrument of a dictatorship of the proletariat. These expressions don’t manage to characterize the phase of rupture between capitalism and communism.

The workers’ councils of the past, apart from a few rare instances, fell well short of the program that we’re tracing. They were managerial, bureaucratic, pedantic, argumentative, dispute-ridden, incapable of holding a perspective consistent with their own natures. They died of it. This doesn’t prove that the councilist form is worthless, but rather that it was founded on ground that wasn’t yet fertile.

In 1956 the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest, which governed the entirety of the region, called for its own suicide with the restoration of parliamentary democracy.

The workers’ councils of the past nevertheless have the merit of having existed. They demonstrated the capacity of workers to see to their own affairs, to take charge of and run their own factories and towns. They’re linked to the formidable movements by which workers toppled the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy, at least for a while. If these episodes have been concealed and confused, it’s because some people don’t want to see the proletariat once again resuming what it did in Catalonia, in Poland, in China: to do without masters and be fine for it.

The counterrevolution, including in the Soviet Union, has never been able to accommodate this. That the councils demonstrate moderation is one thing; that the counterrevolution be moderate toward them is another.

The workers’ councils’ best showings have taken place when they’ve had to respond to their enemies quickly, clearly, and forcefully. They’re forged directly as an organization of struggle. Their project may be limited, but they know it.

At other times, they get bogged down in administration, in waiting. Their sole raison d’être seems to be the bourgeois power vacuum. You see the development of magnificent organizational structures—but this is carried out in the void, outside of the imperatives of struggle. The apparent absence of peril leads to the worst delusions.

The council appears as a worker response to the vacuum left by bourgeoisie, rather than as a level of organization imposed by the radical nature of the struggle itself.

We are for workers’ councils. But we are against councilist ideology. This ideology sees councils not as a moment in the revolution but as its goal. Socialism is the replacement of the power of the bourgeoisie with the power of the councils, of capitalist management with worker management. The failure or the victory of the revolution is a matter of organization. Where Leninists put everything on the party, councilists put everything on the council.

Workers’ councils will be what they do. Their only chance of victory is to undertake—and to be—the organization of communization.

For communists, revolution isn’t a matter of organization. What determines the possibility of communism is a certain level of development of the productive forces and of the proletarian class. There are problems of organization, but they can’t be posed independent of what’s actually being organized, the tasks actually being set. Are organizational rules neutral? Are they purely technical questions? Of course not. Their determinations are of great importance. Some complement and foster communist action. Others impede it. But it’s a serious delusion to believe that the promotion of certain rules, especially on the control of delegates, would be enough to prevent bureaucratization, lies, division. Bureaucrats are professionals of the organization in its capacity as a separate organization. They like to stress the prerequisites of action, the democratic mechanisms, rather than action itself. Frustrating and ill-suited rules, even if they’re formally anti-bureaucratic, run the risk of expediting the task.

In the event that councils do develop and can no longer be easily liquidated, the worst enemies of the revolution will pretend at being councilists in order to best put an end to councils. They’ll try to turn them into arenas for their own machinations, to exclude revolutionaries. Against communism, the dregs of the old world won’t hesitate to rechristen themselves as councils.

From the character of past councils, often not very communist, can it be deduced that the time for councils has passed? Isn’t all institutionalization counter-revolutionary?

We don’t see workers’ councils as institutions. Like it or not, the revolution will have to deal with problems of administration, of maintaining order, of integrating opposing tendencies. It’ll still be necessary to govern, if not all people, then at least some people. Looting can be considered a healthy reaction to scarcity and the provocations of the commodity. It might play a beneficial role in a phase of rupture: sinking the commodity and letting off steam. But you can’t institutionalize looting by making it the regular method for the communist distribution of products. Products can’t all be left up to unrestricted distribution. It’s necessary to organize, allocate, limit. That’s the task of the councils.

As the scarcity of goods begins to ease and the counter-revolution to retreat, councils will lose their state-like character. They won’t be retired. They’ll blend into social life.

To reject councils out of purism when they arise in accordance with real needs is to cut yourself out of the revolutionary process. It’s better to participate in their creation, in their operation, in their potential dissolution, depending on the struggle and the balance of power between revolution and counterrevolution.

Participation in councils doesn’t signify that revolutionaries have to renounce acting and organizing autonomously. Councils are mass organizations—hence a certain ponderousness, hence a pace of radicalization slower than that of some segments of the population. The evolution of councils will be partly determined by what’s done alongside them.

What needs to be combated and sabotaged are the corporatist councils, the managerial organizations, the neo-syndicalist or neo-political groups that would seek to appropriate the organization of social life for the benefit of a minority. A system can’t be called a soviet if it would preserve commodity production, build up a police force, demand the return of bosses…

The council is necessary when it comes to administering a territory. They vanish when this necessity disappears temporarily, in relation to some balance of power, or permanently, due to the consolidation of communism. Some groups might intervene and communize stocks of goods, depending on a revolutionary situation, without being willing or able to permanently take on the attendant production and distribution. The question is knowing when people have the means to move on, from this type of ad hoc wildcat action, to the direct administration of a territory. The advantage is that they can better manage their resources in order to feed the population or lead the struggle. The disadvantage is that they paint targets on their backs. From the moment they accept this risk, there arises the problem of the councilist organization of the territory—the problem of the constitution of a revolutionary power.

Even if this power needs to seek the greatest support and participation from the masses, it doesn’t seek to establish itself democratically, for example by organizing elections.

Democracy

What is there beneath the heavens more beautiful than democracy, the power of the sovereign people? The term democracy inspires as much support as capitalism can arouse distaste. Everybody’s for democracy, whether they be republican or in a crown, bourgeois or for the people. If there’s one thing everyone scolds their adversaries about, it’s that they aren’t democratic enough.

Anyone who rises up against democracy can only be nostalgic for the absolute monarchies of old, at best. In general, people preferable to slap them with the infamous label of fascist. The most dogged are often Marxists and Marxist-Leninists who forget what their founding fathers said about democracy, who are eager to mask their own taste for power and dictatorship… Hypocritically, certain guilt-ridden nostalgics of Stalinism will accuse us of being Stalinists.

Democracy seems like the antithesis of capitalist despotism. Where everyone knows that a minority rules in actuality, they claim to oppose it with the power drawn from universal suffrage.

In reality, capitalism and democracy are in league. Democracy is capital’s fig leaf. Democratic values, far from being subversive, are the idealized expression of the actual, less-than-noble tendencies of capitalist society. Communists don’t intend to realize the trinity “liberty, equality, fraternity,” any more than “work, family, fatherland.”1

If democracy is the daughter of capital, how is it that dictatorship and capitalism should so often coexist? How is it that the majority of men live should under authoritarian regimes? How is it that, even in democratic countries, its workings should be constantly disrupted?

Democratic values and aspirations are the consequence of capital’s homogenizing nature. They correspond to the end of the individual’s integration into a community and a network of stable relationships. They also correspond to the necessity of maintaining an idealized community, of resolving conflicts, of limiting clashes for the good of all. The minority yields to the majority. Democracy isn’t a simple lie, a commonplace illusion. It draws its content from a torn social reality that it makes a show of reunifying. Within democratic aspirations, there’s a search for community, a will to respect the other. But the basis on which it takes root and tries to grow prevents it from succeeding.

Still, democracy is often too dangerous for capital, or at least for certain established interests. This is why it’s constantly being subjected to constraints. Apart from a few exceptions, these constraints, and even simple dictatorship, are presented as victories for democracy itself. What tyrant doesn’t claim to govern, if not through the people, then at least for the people?

Democracy, which during calm periods can seem like a good way of paying off workers’ struggles, sees itself shamelessly abandoned as soon as the defense of capital demands it. There are always a few intellectuals and politicians entirely surprised to see themselves so readily sacrificed upon the altar of the interests of the powerful.

Democracy and dictatorship oppose each other, but they aren’t alien to each other. Democracy, as far as it implies the minority’s subjugation to the majority, is a form of dictatorship. To make decisions, a junta of dictators does have to resort to democratic mechanisms.

It’s sometimes forgotten that fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, in order to establish themselves, mingled terrorist tactics with regular elections. They enjoyed pitting the broad masses, their popular tribunals, against handfuls of “traitors,” “anti-patriots,” the “anti-party.”

Communism isn’t the enemy of democracy because it would rather be the friend of dictatorship and fascism. It’s the enemy of democracy because it’s the enemy of politics. That said, communists aren’t indifferent to the regimes under which they live. They prefer to go quietly to sleep each night without wondering if this is the night that someone will come to drag them out of bed and march them to prison.

Critique of the state cannot replace critique of politics. Some attack the machinery of state only to better protect politics, just as some pedagogues critique the school in order to apply pedagogy to all forms of social relation. For Leninists, everything is political. Behind every manifestation of capital, they see an intention, a design. Capital becomes the instrument of a political project which must be opposed by another political project.

Politics is the domain of liberty—of action, of the maneuver—in contrast with economic fatalism. The economy, the domain of production and goods, is ruled by necessity. Economic evolutions and crises appear in the guise as natural phenomena that elude man’s grasp.

The left is in the habit of emphasizing politics’ possibilities, the right the necessities of the economy. A false debate.

More and more, politics is looking like a replica of economic life.

For a time, it was able to play a role of compromise and alliance between social strata. Today, the importance of politics as economic intervention has augmented. But at the same time, the political sphere has lost its autonomy. There’s no longer anything but a single politic of capital, which both the left and the right are forced to undertake, regardless of the particular interests of their social bases.

If the state seems like a more-or-less delimitable institution, politics is born and reborn from every pore of society. Even though it manifests as the actions of a particular social stratum of militants and politicians, it’s drawn from and reflected in the behavior of each person. That’s what gives it its strength, what gives rise to the idea that any social solution can only be political.

Politics stems from—hinges on—the dissociation between decision and action, as well as on the separations that set individuals against one another. Politics appear primarily as this constant quest for power that animates men in capitalist society. Democracy and despotism themselves seem to be the only ways to resolve problems between people. Democracy’s introduction to relations between couples, or families, passes for a new stage in human progress. Above all, maybe in the least unpleasant way, democracy suggests the loss of a profound unity that could unite human beings.

Communism doesn’t separate decision and execution. There’s no longer a division between two groups, or even two distinct and hierarchical moments. People do what they have to do, or what they’ve decided to do, without second-guessing about whether they’re the majority or the minority—notions that presuppose the existence of a formal community.

The principle of unanimity prevails, in the sense that those who do something are initially in agreement, and that the agreement would have furnished the basis of and possibility for common action. The group doesn’t exist independent of or prior to action. It doesn’t divide itself up in the vote in order to then reunify through the subjugation of one party to another party. It’s established in and through the ability of people to identify with and understand the perspective of the other.

It’s not about systematically rejecting every vote and every submission of the minority to the majority. These are technical formations that can’t be given an absolute value. It may be that the minority is the one in possession of the facts. It may be that the majority yields to the minority, given the weight of what’s at stake for that minority.

Is it that communism is the advent of freedom? Yes, if by that you mean that men will have more choices than at present, that they’ll be able to live in harmony with their preferences.

What we reject is the philosophy that brings free will into opposition with determinism. This separation reflects the opposition between man and world, individual and society. It expresses the deracination of the individual, his inability to grasp his own needs and to satisfy them. He can choose between a thousand jobs, a thousand hobbies, a thousand lovers, and be influenced in a thousand ways, because nothing actually affects him. No certainty occupies him. He doubts everything, himself first and foremost. In doing so, he’s ready to endure anything, and he often believes himself to have chosen. Liberty presents itself as the philosophical garments of misery, doubt as the expression of free thinking when it actually signifies man’s confusion, his inability to situate himself within the world.

Man loses his chains in the course of the revolution, but finally becoming himself, he finds himself enchained simultaneously to his desires and to the necessities of the moment. He once again becomes passionate, once again comes to know himself. The extraordinary climate of joy and of tension, in the insurrections, is bound to the feeling that everything is possible and, jointly, that what you’re doing must absolutely be done. There’s no longer any need to hesitate or be shuffled around between meaningless activities. Obligations, subjective and objective, blend together.

The electoral circus

If you attack democracy, the wise ones will counter us, it’s because you know that it would doom you.

We’re under no illusions. Were the system functioning normally, we’d absolutely be pulverized. Our platform might not be considered unsympathetic by most voters, but it’d certainly be deemed unrealizable. It’s only by negating themselves as voters that they could begin to glimpse the possibility of its realization.

If politics is the art of the possible, as they say, we situate ourselves outside of that particular possibility.

Gentlemen electioneers and democrats, are you ready to question the population on certain issues and take their responses into account? You who are the lackeys of capital—are you ready to organize a referendum on whether or not to continue upholding capitalism? There are a multitude of questions that you’ll make sure never to ask. They’re ruled out from the start as unrealistic. It’s you who determine what is and isn’t possible. This still isn’t enough for you. It’s necessary that your realistic programs and your realistic forecast should never be implemented.

The state survives on the taxes of its citizens. It’s managed through their voting. If its policies were to be approved and supported directly by private individuals’ acceptance or refusal of tax payments, it would be in danger of losing many supporters. When he pays, the citizen feels a sense of having been had. When he votes—he who’d otherwise have to shut up—he’s flattered to be solicited for his opinion.

There’s a disconnect between, on the one hand, the actual management of the system and the classes of functionaries in charge of it, and, on the other hand, party politics. Political theater.

Electoral democracy serves to hide the fact that the important decisions are beyond the reach of voters and even politicians.

Political and electoral reality is more and more soused in the commodity. Democracy appears as the direct reflection of the economic world. The voter is no longer even a citizen but a consumer of platforms and ideologies. The spectacle of politics and its privileged moments, elections, must be denounced for what they are: one way, among others, to make the people forget that they are nothing.

It sometimes happens that people take liars at their words. After witnessing annulled elections or what appears to them like an electoral victory, they start to rebel. This no longer has anything to do with electoral reality.

We don’t advocate for electoral participation, and even less for abstention. When proletarians vote they are, if not right, then at least within their rights. This ritual will only really appear illusory, ridiculous, and pitiful when the whole of living conditions begins to truly transform. Meanwhile, it has its place with the rest of the arsenal.

In a communist organization, there may well be elections. That’s how delegates are appointed. But the election no longer seems like a special moment. The elected no longer has a blank check. He fulfills a function that’s one among many, and no more sacred than any other. In appointing this or that person or this or that team, or in approving their actions after the fact, the rank-and-file group is only providing itself with guarantees as to the implementation of its own platform. What counts isn’t the procedure of appointment but the action really taken.

The formation of workers’ councils isn’t predicated on a general electoral referendum. It’s not a question of liberating a territory in order to hold elections there that would only be recognized as valid by their organizers, as is the custom. On that subject, you have the poor example of the Paris Commune.

Even if elections could be seriously be organized in this kind of situation, it would only dissociate decision from action and resurrect the political professional. Elections presume that voters be registered and mapped.

The setting up of an administration on the basis of elections presupposes the existence of this administration! It’s not power and the state that are born of elections, but the reverse.

Mass revolutionary organizations will be formed and reinforced in accordance with practical tasks. They’ll be born of the actions of a minority. You’re never going to see 51% of the population suddenly rushing toward the same goals. This active minority will be distinguished by the fact that they won’t organize the rest of the population, but will seek to involve them in the resolution of collective problems. Its success will depend on its ability to compel the participation of far more than 51% of the population.

Communism can’t be established by the means of a putsch. Faced against the power of the State and its instruments of repression, communism can only prevail if it can manage to cultivate the more-or-less active participation of a big portion of the population, and to isolate a tiny minority as its adversary.

The proletarian revolution, in breaking the chains of wage labor, will enable and require a mass participation beyond all possible comparison to that of bourgeois political revolutions­—even when those revolutions were popular revolutions. Those popular revolutions, which democrats align themselves with, weren’t decided democratically. En 1789, if the French had been given the choice, would they have voted for the revolution? In reality, it’s because of the archaic nature of the privileges of the nobility that a segment of the population rose up. Driven by the successes and results of their actions, they gradually overcame a worm-riddled system.

The communist party will only rouse an overwhelming majority of the population when it seems like the immediate means of redressing the problems of everyday life. Revolutions don’t arise when enough people become revolutionaries. People become revolutionaries when the revolution appears—when they see it as possible and necessary to live differently.

Today, when all the elements of the societal structure support each other, money’s disappearance seems impossible. Those who champion it come off as tender dreamers. But in the event that market mechanisms were shut down, continuing to depend on money for your necessities will come off like idiotic acrobatics. People will rally to communism not out of ideology, or even out of disgust for a dying society, but out of simple biological necessity. It’ll then become necessary to fend off opportunists, incapable of taking a long-term perspective, who will try to find immediate personal gain in the situation.

Why, if we hold that the revolution has to be borne by the broadest participation possible, don’t we pronounce ourselves democrats? It would maybe hinder some of the opposition and win us a few friends. But as it happens, we aren’t politicians; a superficial alliance would be more hindrance than help. We need to be clear in order to unite and orient our supporters on solid footing. As to the actual opposition—we don’t want to make their jobs easier, but in any case, the things we actually say or want matter little to them. Either they misunderstand or they misrepresent, even at the risk of pilfering a few ideas from the work of revolutionaries in order to spice up their own platform.

Democracy is supposed to be the power of the people, the power of all. The communist revolution doesn’t mean to change the form of power, or to give it to the people. It aims to divest it from everyone.

Power always has need of a legitimation external to itself. God for monarchies, the people for democracies, crowned or republican. Is there anything more real about the people than there is about God? No; God is a character, an incarnation full of humanity, whereas the people tends to be nothing more than a pure abstraction of humanity. This people that’s invoked to endorse the state is only its own reflection. Between this people in notion—this political people—and the actual people, diverse, living, stupid or smart, who express themselves in their everyday lives, there’s a world of difference.

It’s not politics that expresses and incarnates the ideas and the will of human beings; it’s human beings who become an apparatus for political opinions. They become abstractions themselves when, voters or militants, they go to profess these opinions.

Why don’t communists, who would like to do away with exploitation and wars, renounce the coercions and tactics of dictatorialism?

Do we believe that the dominant classes are going to renounce the use of these means? Do we believe that, during a period of upheaval, the most democratic of states won’t cast aside all their fine principles? The most liberal among the propertied, the privileged, and the servants of order will maybe claim to fight for democracy. They won’t draw attention to the defense of their actual interests. But there’s little chance that they’ll fight democratically.

It’s in the context of a crisis situation that bourgeois methods should be compared against revolutionary methods. It’s hypocritical to oppose the behavior of the most democratic of bourgeois states in peacetime with the behavior of revolutionaries in times of trouble. There’s every chance that, in a period of crisis, revolutionaries will prove themselves more humane and more democratic than the champions of law and order.

The strike

Democracy is seeing itself refuted, with the spread of wildcat strikes and uprisings. The outbreak of action doesn’t hang on a democratic consultation of the rank and file or their representatives.

A fraction of workers—being the most aggressive, least alienated, and most advantageously situated—are revolting. There’s no schism between decision and execution, between those who decide and those who execute.

The fundamental problem isn’t necessarily how to rally everybody. From a key position in production, it’s possible to force bosses to back down. The work stoppage can be its own goal; it’s only a matter of taking a little breather or refusing to do some given job.

It’s possible for a walkout by a handful of workers to instigate a general walkout. That’s what the world saw happening, on the scale of a nation, during May 1968.

The strike was spreading. It was approved of by a great majority of workers. Rapport was forged in action, and there wouldn’t have been some prior consultation with all those who’d find themselves affected.

If the workers had been required to reach a democratic decision on the propriety of opening hostilities, they might have given up. But the example of a small number showed them the way to step into the breach, the fearfulness of management, and the likelihood of success. They were gripped by the atmosphere of struggle and solidarity, better able to overcome the feelings of discouragement and resignation that daily helplessness engenders.

Let’s imagine that the strike had been decided by means of a referendum. Things probably would have unfolded in a different way. No more shock of the workers’ offensive: the opposition would have been informed of the nature, form, scope, and goals of the movement. Organization would have preceded action and discouraged initiatives. The strikers would have remained more or less passive and, apart from a minority of union members or trade unionists, alienated from their own strike.

When workers begin to radicalize, the democratic moment presents itself more and more as a moment of recuperation. It’s a matter of voting on the resumption. Bureaucrats, specialists in negotiation, get back on top.

Democracy becomes the manifestation of giving up. It becomes, visibly, what it already was in essence.

Turning to a sole, sovereign general assembly isn’t enough to combat bureaucratization. The assembly can become a privileged venue for manipulation, a mass gathering of segregated and powerless individuals, the apparatus of confused and useless chatter.

General assemblies are necessary. It’s necessary to be able to take stock, to assess your strengths, to oversee and to hold accountable delegates and special committees. But the assembly can’t manifest as the moment that everything hangs on, for whose benefit the rest of reality is sloughed off.

The party

As the crisis of capital continues to intensify and render visible the vanity of capitalist solutions to this crisis, the communist party will continue reforming itself within the population.

The party’s formation isn’t the occasion that causes the crisis. It isn’t the prerequisite for the assault on capital. Its quantitative and qualitative development, on the contrary, is extremely dependent on the escalation of this crisis. It will aim to guide and facilitate the outcome.

The party isn’t a gathering constituted according to some fixed doctrine that would go on expanding without its nature changing. The party isn’t something that just exists; it’s always being constituted. Bit by bit it emerges, takes on contours and contents that are clearer and clearer. Its nature coheres, and the number of its members increases the more that possibilities take shape for a rupture with the system.

Yet the formation of the party isn’t a new and indeterminate phenomenon. The party, such as it arises at some given historical moment, is the resurgence of a movement that eludes these temporal limits. The modern party rekindles its connection with a party whose reality and even memory had been effaced by the counter-revolution.

Outside of insurrectionary times, when communism can only be asserted timidly and haltingly, the party, strictly speaking, is condemned to remain a tiny, overlooked segment of the population. Alongside conscious communists, there are numerous unconscious communists who demonstrate revolutionary exigencies through their behavior. The party, broadly speaking—of those who show themselves to be more or less consciously communist in light of ever-increasing occasions—isn’t visible. Its image doesn’t take form in the reigning spectacle. Its power, however, makes itself felt on the very level of this spectacle. Publicists and politicians, in order to peddle their wares, make garbled echoings of its hopes. The bourgeois and the bureaucrats tremble before this menace, still nameless and still faceless.

It’s contradictory to assert yourself communist in a world that represses communism with whatever it takes. Communists aren’t ubermenschen who already live differently than their peers. They aren’t immune to the prevailing misery. Their theoretical consciousness carries little weight in transforming their own lives.

It’s essential, and in any case inevitable, that conscious communists should appear and that they should take care to understand and prepare for the communist revolution. But you can’t compare conscious communists with unconscious communists. What matters is to see how and why communist consciousness develops as a practical necessity.

There are certainly people who call themselves revolutionaries. The production of these “revolutionaries” isn’t independent of the escalation of the crisis. The majority among them aren’t communists and don’t even know what they are or what they want. The desire for revolution presents itself as the last and the most hollow of possible desires in this society. It’s an abstraction, cut off from tangible needs and hopes. The “revolutionary” can pontificate on anything, engross himself in questions of strategy, but he’s incapable of defining what it is he aspires toward. If he speaks of the transformations to be made, his vision is overhung by the question of power. The society to be built rests on a new distribution of power. What is “wanted” is popular power, student power, power to the councils (+ electrification or automation!), power to the people over their own lives, the power to have power over the power to…

On the contrary, the majority of those who’ll be revolutionaries, when the revolution corresponds to tangible needs and possibilities, don’t feel the need to call themselves revolutionaries.

It’s only in a phase of open confrontation, when there is the possibility of communizing the social body, that the party can cease being only a gathering of common opinions or a product of sporadic action. It can finally become a community of action.

When the proletariat in its entirety participates in the revolution, the party isn’t mixed up with the class. It doesn’t claim to be nor to represent the proletariat. It is the most lucid and the most determined fraction within it. It coexists, collaborates, or clashes with other fractions more moderate or more subservient to bourgeois apparatuses and ideologies.

Its action can be characterized in one sentence: To create the situation that renders it entirely impossible to go back.

It’s normal for oppositions to manifest, between the actions of communists and the behavior of the masses. This isn’t a sign of some fundamental antagonism. The party doesn’t have to eliminate mass organizations and movements. Councils and other rank-and-file committees don’t have to eliminate the party. If either of these two things happened, it would necessarily signify the end, the downfall of the revolution. This antagonistic vision is a legacy of the Russian Revolution and the councilist wave of the twenties. It has only one fault: taking as communist organizations that weren’t.

The party will fight for the councils because that struggle can’t be dissociated from the struggle for communism—even if on this or that point or organizational mode, communists find themselves in disagreement with the masses.

The party itself, which isn’t an organization nor, worse, an institution consolidated from above, will organize itself on the councilist model. It’s the meeting of those who set themselves, beyond immediate tasks and concerns, to the defense of the whole of the movement. It needs to designate strongholds to be dismantled, concentrate forces on strategic points, propose solutions.

There’s no one organization that will be able to claim that it’s the party. The latter never identifies with any one sect or mass organization. The supporters of communism show themselves through what they do, not through membership in some limited grouping. The forms of organization don’t need to be fixed or consolidated in advance. They’ll be discovered over the course of the movement.